Killing the beast: taking a monster through multi-monitor 3D

We had the chance to test the Digital Storm Black|Ops Assassin Edition, with …

At E3 and CES you'll often get the chance to play on ridiculous gaming systems, but the multi-monitor, full 3D experience is very much a niche thing. So when Digital Storm gave me the chance to play with one of their 3D systems for a month, I lept at it. Who wouldn't want to live with a screaming, pre-built system for a few weeks? I signed the loaner agreement, and promptly began waiting by the door.

When the system arrived, I had trouble walking the box to the living room to get everything set up. The packaging for the system itself—this is before the three ASUS VG247 3D monitors, mind you—weighed 80 lbs. Some of that was packing material, but not much of it. If you're interested in a LAN party box, this is not your system. Let's take a look at what happens when you put God's own system to work in the harshest conditions gaming can currently offer.

Brian Won, our resident hardware guru in charge of the Ars System Guides, gave us his take on it: "This box looks fairly representative of a high-end overclocked gaming system today. A Core i7-950 overclocked to 4Ghz on air is about as fast as we can expect a reasonable system builder to push things, while 6GB of memory and only an older Intel X25-M G2 80GB SSD are both merely adequate for a $3,000 system," he said.

"For a $5,000 system we would expect to see a newer, faster Crucial RealSSD C300 or Sandforce SF-1200 based SSD along with 12GB of memory." He also points out that this is the rare system that "almost" justifies the 1000W power supply. "Marketing hyperbole, smallish SSD, and only 6GB of memory aside, the specs look pretty typical and reasonably solid for such a high-end gaming rig," he concluded.

Behold, the beast

I would love to live in a world where such stats are treated in such a blasé manner. I was already drooling all over the floor getting things connected. Keep in mind that since my time with the system, certain components and pricing may have changed in this build.

It's also important to note that this rig was powerful on a surreal level. It cut through every game I threw at it like warm butter. The benchmarks were at "holy crap" levels across the board, which is why I wanted to make sure I tested the system with the three-monitor set up. Sure, you can build a system that can do well with a single monitor, but I was interested in bringing this thing to its knees, and that was going to take three monitors running in full 3D. Let's see how things held up.

Call of Duty: Black Ops

This was an interesting test case, because the 3D effect is so convincing and there have been so many reports of the game being CPU-bound. We played through the first mission, up to the point where the one guy gets a slo-mo bullet in the head, and we grabbed the average framerate using FRAPS.

In the first test, we ran the game at 5760 by 1080, 2X AA, High Texture quality, with six of the ten boxes ticked for anisotropic filtering. The difficulty was set to Recruit to minimize the chances of dying and to allow us to make as close to the same run each time as possible.